IT’S Marc Cherry’s first series since Desperate Housewives — a show which culminated in a blazing lawsuit with one of his ex-Wives Nicollette Sheridan — but despite making television history with his new show Devious Maids Cherry faced career-threatening controversy right from the start.

Casting five Latin women in the lead roles — a first for an English language show in the US — did not insulate Devious Maids from intense heat when it began.

American network ABC, which had such giddy global success with eight Emmy and Golden Globe Award-winning seasons of Desperate Housewives, knocked the show back.

“Too controversial,” Cherry believes, although he never got an explanation.

The biggest backlash came parts of from the Latin community itself, insulted that Latin women were cast as maids.

“This is southern California,” Cherry says. “And the vast majority of domestic workers in Beverly Hills and Bel Air homes are people of Latino descent.”

He’d bought the rights from a Mexican show, and with Desperate Housewives star Eva Longoria as executive producer adapted it for US television.

“And it’s not an area that’s really explored on other soap operas, what it is the maids get to witness, how they change the course of their employers’ lives and vice versa,” Cherry says now.

He says he also felt as if he’d seen the other side himself, when he worked in the home of legendary TV star Dixie Carter, before he made it as a writer, starting his career on Golden Girls, alongside his friend Mitch Hurwitz, who went on to create comedy classic Arrested Development.

Cleaning up ... The cast of Devious Maids. Picture: SuppliedSource:Supplied

“I understood the initial reaction, because I had that initial reaction as well, just from the title, being a Latin woman, and actress — maid, really?” says Ana Ortiz, who plays one of the maids. “But I knew it was Marc Cherry, and I’ve known Eva for a long time, and she’s one of the smartest, most talented, caring women that I know, and she always fights for our community, so I knew that it had to be something really worthwhile. And then when I read the script I was like oh yeah, the maids are the ones with all the real power on the show ...”

Cherry says Devious Maids may well be his last TV series. “I would never say my last one ever. I do have a hope to write for the theatre, I was a musical theatre major in college.

Star power ... Ana Ortiz and Grant Show from Devious Maids at the Shangri La Hotel in Sydney.Source:News Corp Australia

“I also thought, you know, before I leave TV forever because boy, as I get older, I’m 52 now, it just gets harder and harder, oh my god, when I was on Golden Girls I was 30, I used to be able to stay up all night to finish a scene and bounce into work the next day and now it’s like oh no I need that sleep something fierce. But I’ve got some cachet, let me try one other series while I’m relatively lucid.”

Cherry can also take credit, if that’s the word, for a major TV brand, The Real Housewives Of ... “Well apparently they had shot the pilot for the original, which was The Real Housewives Of Orange County, and they had a different title.

“And then Desperate Housewives premiered and so the producers decided to entitle it The Real Housewives Of ... to try and capitalise on the word Housewives.

“And the thing that was so funny about that for me was that when we tested Desperate Housewives the woman who was running the testing said to me that she personally felt I should change the title, because she felt that high-powered business women in New York and LA would find the word Housewives demeaning.

“And I looked at her as if she was crazy, and I said first of all I think it’s a fabulous title and second of all you know my mother comes from Oklahoma, the midwest, and the women out there still refer to themselves as housewives ...

“So I insisted that we keep the title as it was. And the word housewives came roaring back in American consciousness.

“Desperate Housewives was the number one show in our very first week. Even the title spoke to something that women understood.”

Devious Maids starts on Universal Channel, Foxtel on Thursday, July 24 at 8.30pm

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